Free Software Awards for Creative Commons and Wietse Venema

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has announced the winners of its annual free software awards, with Richard Stallman as the presenter.

The two awards went to Creative Commons in the category of Projects of Social Benefit and Postfix creator Wietse Venema for the Advancement of Free Software.

Creative Commons has since its launch in 2001 continuously promoted creative, educational and scientific works "that can be shared and built upon by others," according to the announcement made at the LibrePlanet GNU/Linux conference March 21-22 at the Harvard Science Center in Cambridge MA. The Project of Social Benefit category is awarded annually to a project that "intentionally and significantly benefits society" in its applications or ideas that promote free software. Previous winners were the Groklaw online legal magazine, Sahana disaster management collaboration software, and Wikipedia.

The Dutchman Wietse Venema was honored for his technical contributions in the Advancement of Free Software category. Venema is creator of the Postfix open source Mail Transfer Agent (MTA). Postfix emerged from IBM's labs, where Venema still works at the Watson Research Center. The mail server is under the IBM Public License that is currently incompatible with GPL, but still recognized by the FSF as a free license. Some of the previous winners in Venema's category included Harald Welte, Ted Ts'o, Alan Cox, Lawrence Lessig and Guido van Rossum.

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At the LibrePlanet conference, held in Cambridge MA. on Saturday, the Free Software Foundation presented its annual free software awards. Winners were the software activist John Gilmore and the internet archive, Archive.org.

Wietse Venema, the developer of Postfix, points in an advisory to a security problem in connection with the Linux and Solaris filesystems. As more recent versions of these operating systems no longer comply with the POSIX standard for links, local attackers may be able to attach files to other users' Postfix mailboxes.